Maagi3

Bit of a backstory to start with to cover why tonight set me off as badly as it did.

Nova is my first ever cat. She's seven years old as of 2025, and I've had her for all seven years since I moved out to Washington state. Unfortunately back in 2023, I made the stupid decision of getting an optional vaccine that resulted in an injection site sarcoma. While I'm still grappling with the guilt of that decision, we've spent the last nearly two years attempting to fight this highly aggressive tumor. We've been through three surgeries, two rounds of electro-chemo therapy, and one round of an experimental gold nanotechnology treatment. This has wracked up a lot of medical expenses, but monetarily I'm still doing quite fine.

Well, come Monday, she's getting her leg amputated as a last ditch effort to control this damn tumor. Obviously, the decision to have my first ever daughter's leg cut off has been weighing heavily on me, but I also had a four week trip to Colorado planned this weekend before that surgery to spend time with my family for my brother and mom's birthdays. I had hoped this would help me.

Let's just say, I'm now alone in my hotel room, writing this after having left the party.

One other bit of backstory that's important here is that I'm an amateur artists and a relatively decent writer. That means I'm very much in the creative field, have a lot of creative friends, and art is just a very big and important part of my life, happiness, and mental health. Which means I also hate, despise, and abhor all manner of AI. I consider AI art and writing to be a waste of resources, and a way of telling artists that you don't care about their craft.

Of course, I'm the only one in the family that is an artist, thus the only one that shares this view. I'm sure it's pretty obvious where these two stories are going to meet up.

Tonight, while I was sitting around just chatting, everyone else started pulling out their phones and using some AI bullshit apps to start creating cartoon images of themselves and their pets. I was already pissed off and annoyed by this, but I mostly ignored it.

Right up until they fed a picture of me into one, to turn me into a cartoon, without my consent. So, great, my picture now lives in that bullshit database of that AI. That almost set me off, but I did my best to control my frustration.

And then they told me that I should get an AI portrait of my cat who is about to have surgery.

THAT crossed the line. That crossed so many lines that I got up right then and there. I told them good night, they asked why I was leaving, and I just said I had a headache.

They're all fully aware that I am anti-AI. I have never made this a secret. I've even made them art in the past as gifts, and they liked them. But to have them point-blank tell me to use that garbage to create a portrait of my precious cat right before she's due to have her fucking leg cut off??? When I'm already in a bad mental state, already worrying about her, and already annoyed that they used a picture of me to play around with this stupid app???

I don't know, it just broke me. I'm not going to police their use of AI, but I don't want my own pictures to be part of it, and I definitely do not want my cat to be part of it. It's already going to be an incredibly long week of recovery ahead of us, and all I want is for her to be doing better. I don't want some AI garbage of her.

At least I don't have to make art for them anymore. It's clear they don't appreciate creativity, so I'll just stick to drawing for myself from now on. Myself and my friends who actually respect artists, at least. But I'm just...I'm not happy tonight.